“No literature has ever been so shockingly personal as that of our time — it asks every question that is forbidden by polite society.”
"On the Modern Element in Modern Literature," Partisan Review (January/February 1961); reprinted as "On the Teaching of Modern Literature," Beyond Culture (1965)
Context: A real book reads us. I have been read by Eliot's poems and by Ulysses and by Remembrance of Things Past and by The Castle for a good many years now, since early youth. Some of these books at first rejected me; I bored them. But as I grew older and they knew me better, they came to have more sympathy with me and to understand my hidden meanings. Their nature is such that our relationship has been very intimate. No literature has ever been so shockingly personal as that of our time — it asks every question that is forbidden by polite society.
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Lionel Trilling 30
American academic 1905–1975Related quotes
Source: The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832), p. 136-137
Well, that's the question. The answer may not help him, but the question now has been asked.
The next question is what? How? And so all through the ages, people have been trying to find out the answer to that question. We've found the answer, and we do fly. This is true of every accomplishment, whether it's technology or literature, poetry, political systems or anything else. That is it. Ask the next question. And the one after that.
His explanation of the meaning of a small symbol he used when writing his signature, as quoted in an interview with David Duncan (with an image of his signature) http://www.physics.emory.edu/~weeks/misc/duncan.html, sometime around 1980.
Part 3: "The Sense of Human Dignity", §5 (p. 61)
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)
“The fundamental question of politics has always been whether there should be politics.”
Foreword (1984) to The Market for Liberty (1970)
Context: The most interesting political questions throughout history have been whether or not humans will be ruled or free, whether they will be responsible for their actions as individuals or left irresponsible as members of society, and whether they can live in peace by volitional agreements alone.The fundamental question of politics has always been whether there should be politics.
And that last bit I think often gets missed out.
Interview at the Academy of Achievement (23 May 1998).
“Beware of the person that is so empowered they ask questions that only actions can answer.”
Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 110